Session 1: Johanna Drucker: Visual Poetics—A Feminist Approach
Monday, January 18, 2021, 8 am EST
Johanna Drucker has been making artist’s books for more than four decades. Many of them address feminist themes about language through the use of visual typography. This talk focuses on a number of those books: From A to Z (1977), History of the/my Wor(l)d (1990), Simulant Portrait (1990), Testament of Women (2006), Damaged Spring (2003) and several collaborations with Susan Bee, A Girl’s Life (2002) and Fabulas Feminae (2015). The talk also addresses ways in which the use of visual typography was gendered within the poetry community and where and how visual poetics as a feminist practice have increased in visibility in recent scholarship. I will touch on the work of Amanda Earl in her anthology project, Judith: 25 Women Making Visual Poetry, and her database of over 500 women writers.
Links and readings
Drucker, From A to Z : Forty Years Later, Jacket2, https://jacket2.org/category/commentary-tags/johanna-drucker
Drucker, “Letterpress Language,” Leonardo, Vol. 17, No.1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1574850?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
Drucker, “Diagrammatic Writing and Stochastic Poetics,” Iowa Review (PDF)
Drucker, “InVisible Women or Gender in Concrete,” for Amanda Earl, ed., Judith: 25 Women making Visual Poetry, (forthcoming). (PDF)
Drucker, “Graphic-Poetics and other Hybridities,” (forthcoming). (PDF)
Susan Bee has been a member of A.I.R. Gallery since 1996. She has had solo shows at Southfirst Gallery, Lisa Cooley Gallery, Accola Griefen Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, Odetta, Belmont University, Kenyon College, Columbia University, William Paterson College, the New York Public Library, Pratt Institute Library, Virginia Lust Gallery, and her work has been included in numerous group shows. Bee has published sixteen artist’s books. She has collaborated with poets Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Johanna Drucker, Rachel Levitsky, and Jerome Rothenberg. Bee is the coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artist’s Writings, Theory, and Criticism, Duke, 2000, and the coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online. Her artist’s book archive and the M/E/A/N/I/N/G archive are at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. Bee’s paintings are on over 50 book covers and her artworks, interviews, and writings have been included in many publications. Bee has been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Times, The New Yorker, ArtNews, The Brooklyn Rail, Artcritical, ArtSlant, The Forward, Huffington Post, Art Papers, and Hyperallergic. She has given presentations at the Whitney Museum, Reina Sofia, Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, College Art Association, Queens Museum, NY Public Library, Parsons, Pratt, School of Visual Arts, M.I.T., University of Pennsylvania, and in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Belgrade, Berlin, Portugal, Spain, Scotland, Sweden, Israel, Cuba, New Zealand, Korea, and China. Bee’s artwork is in many public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Getty Museum, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. She has a BA from Barnard College and a MA in Art from Hunter College. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts in 2014 and has had fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. Bee has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, School of Visual Arts, and Pratt Institute.
Johanna Drucker, cover for Fabulas Feminae, a collaboration with Susan Bee.